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Comment by psyc | Hacker News Reader

I've seen a pattern that makes this self-fulfilling. The normal mix of junior/mid/seniors, plus the rush to market, creates a ton of paralyzing tech debt. Then the tech debt itself levels the playing field, so that the seniors actually are only marginally more productive than the juniors.

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Worse, senior folks have to mentor new folks because they are the experts. Then they have to fix the horrible snafus because only they can. They stop do interesting development entirely as these other duties take over their lives. Then there's turnover and they do it all again until they burn out and leave. Leaving only junior folks and a dumpster fire.

And don't get started on how 'agile' fuels this! In a constant panic mode, there's only ever sprints for small fixes and isolated features. Never time to address what's really wrong in a systematic way. So the flames burn higher...

This is one of the reasons why I pretty much moved to only writing code at home as a hobby as I’ve aged. In “professional” programming it’s always this insane race to puke out as many half working features as fast as possible no matter what the code ends up looking like. The craftsmanship is gone. The focus on quality and correctness is gone. The opportunity to refactor or redo at will is missing. On my hobby projects, I can take my time. I can have 100% test coverage if I want. I can compile cleanly with -Wpedantic if I want. I can move whole modules around if I think it’s best. No need to deal with forced collaboration, change control bureaucracy, or the constant drumbeat of ship ship ship!

The current hiring preferences out there are a perfect fit for the industry’s insane “ship crap as fast as possible” product preferences.

I've done exactly the same, for exactly the same reasons. Now I love programming again.

My antidote to this has been to craft a reputation for doing high quality work with good documentation. I don't let myself get pushed around now with this crap. If I want to spend more time on a feature, because of refactoring, writing some tests or whatever, I just do it. I don't pay attention to the sprint deadline but focus on quality work. I often miss the sprint deadline and make no effort to rush like the rest seem to do.

The result has worked out really well. Managers have quit hassling me about time and I get given the more complex and interesting work. People know I work hard and care about what I produce, if they have to wait they have to wait. I don't ask permission to write the tests I want, or spend a couple of days refactoring if that needs done.

Basically I am the professional coder, not the project managers, so I don't let them dictate how the software gets made. You just need to make sure you don't take it too far and too gratuitous refactoring work. Your reputation is critical for this approach to work.

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